WFQS 375 - WFQS Senior Seminar

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2025/26a: Feminist and Queer Life Writing. In this course we explore forms of memoir and the writing of feminist and queer lives: texts written by and about the feminist and/or queer subject. We explore memoir, autobiographical fiction, and possibly even some literary biography. What motivates a person to tell their life story, or to investigate someone else’s, and how are these stories bound by both authors and readers to narratives of citizenship, belonging, and/or exclusion? What motivates a writer to share what they share, what motivates an audience to demand what it demands from them, and how are demands and motivations framed in specific ways by a feminist project, a queer subjectivity? What claims about the exemplary or excessive qualities of the life story are made, or are emulated, by the life story’s readers? In addition to critical consideration of biography and memoir in traditional media, you have the opportunity to think about the work of memoir in a number of different media, including the graphic novel, unpublished letters and diaries, and in-progress digital forms. Your work in this class also includes examinations of the fake memoir and the digital overshare, and you are invited to curate a branded footprint of your own, using tools of new media. Readings may include works by Jeanette Winterson, Brian Broome, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Simone de Beauvoir, Vivian Gornick, Carmen Maria Machado, Alison Bechdel, and Roxanne Gay. Kristin Sanchez Carter. Kristin Sanchez Carter.

May be repeated for credit if the topic has changed.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: CLS